Cell Phone Viruses

The anti-virus companies like Symantec have issued warning that 3 new malicious programs are hitting certain cellphones. The Trojan horses, or malicious codes that are disguised as legitimate applications, spread via Bluetooth or multimedia messages and can affect phones running the Symbian operating systems. The infection rate so far from the new malware is low but it is a call for alarm.

1. The Bootton.E Trojan horse was spotted last week by F-Secure and Symantec and is perhaps the most potentially crippling of the three to those infected. The program restarts the mobile device but it also releases corrupted components that cause the reboot to fail, leaving the device unusable.
2. The Pbstealer.D Trojan sends an infected user's contact list, notepad and calendar to-do list to other nearby users via Bluetooth.
3. The 3rd Trojan, Sendtool.A, sends malicious programs such as the Pbstealer Trojan to other devices via Bluetooth.

Both Symantec and F-Secure admit that these Trojans are unlikely to spread very widely. Unlike worms on computers that spread without users knowing, the Trojan horses hitting cell phones spread as attachments that require users to download them. So far, worms haven't hit mobile phones but it's very likely that people who write viruses are working on them. But with the looming threat of vulnerabilities being found by malicious code writers, enterprises should put extra effort preparing for the future, who, until now, have been more lax about securing mobile handheld devices than laptops.